OK, we have a full league! More info coming later or tomorrow on the divisions. Also, please remember that the auto-draft is tomorrow morning. Rank your players before that, if you have a desire to do so.

For those of you who might be new to fantasy sports, or new to fantasy hockey, here’s a bit of a primer on what to expect and do.

At some time today, the site should lock the league. At that point you will no longer be allowed to change your team name, but you will be able to upload or create a team logo (I will post a message on the league site info on how to do this). The league will also be broken into divisions, a schedule will be created, and the draft order will be set.Tomorrow morning, the site will perform the automatic draft. The site has the ability to let you pre-rank the pool of players, so that you can try to get those who you rank higher than others. If you do not pre-rank, then the site will use the default player ranking this is available on the site.

Following the draft, you will be able to set your line-up for the first week’s game. Players are sorted out by position: Center, Wing, Defense, Goalie. Each week you can have 12 players active and 4 on the bench. The active players are broken down by position: Center & Wing – 6 players (any combination of the two, but one note here is that last year the site enforced a specific breakdown between the two that wasn’t documented in the league rules, and still isn’t, so I don’t know if it will happen again this season), Defense – 4 players, Goalies – 2 players. The 4 guys on your bench can be any mix of any position.

Immediately post-draft, all undrafted players will be on waivers for 2 days. This gives us all a chance to look at our needs and make claims. The day the waiver requests are made, they are made in order of the waiver order shown on the site. From that point forward, most players are available immediately when you try to grab them. The only exception to that is when someone drops a player, then that guy is on waivers for 2 days to allow everyone a chance to notice it and make a claim.

Once your roster is set and the weekly game starts, you play head to head with another team. You collect points for goals, assists, penalty minutes, saves (goalies)….etc… Look for the section titled “Head-to-Head scoring” at http://freemeeting.2.hockey.cbssports.com/meeting/rules for all of the details.

One odd thing about the hockey scoring is that this site uses something called points averaging that none of their other sports leagues use. Under points averaging, the total points a player earns each week, is divided by the number of games he plays that week. So, you might notice that your scores fluctuate up and down and often will come down quite a bit as the week wears on. For example, you might have a guy who had a great game early in the week and got 10 points. But the instant he steps on the ice for the second game that week, his total for the week will be 5 points, since the 10 is now divide by 2 games. Points he earns in that second game will be added to that 5 points. Then overnight, after each game is over, more adjustments are made. The site will add/remove points for the plus/minus ratings for that day’s games and the goalies will get Win and shutout bonuses.

At the end of the fantasy week, the team with the higher number of points, wins that game and you move on to your next weekly matchup.

Please remember that any lineup changes you made during the week, do not reflect your current weekly game and will only go into effect for the next week. The deadline for lineup changes is 5 minutes before the first NHL game of that week begins.